Across the room, I saw a woman draped in traditional Buddhist Kasaya, or “chougu” if you are Tibetan. While I was here to explore interfaith dialogue, I admit on one level I had no idea what to expect. And seeing this very Eastern expression of religion, my stomach twisted, my teeth ground – I was uncomfortable. On the one hand, in the past several years, I had made great intellectual strides towards interfaith dialogue among representatives from the Abrahamic religions, in which a shared tradition of sacred texts made certain intellectual realities possible. And while our traditional heritages shared an ensemble of characters, each who had their different entrances and exits, my own view of this world stage was still hindered by a narrower view from the back that continued to blur its true dimensions.

As this smiling Buddhist and I shook hands for the first time and made our introductions, for we had been seated next to one another for a few hours already, my filter had broadened, and the horizon before me was threatening to expand once more.

Early in my life, I learned that mission statements are only as good as your intention to own them.  Loyola Blakefield, where I attended high school, was an all-boys Roman Catholic Jesuit institution whose motto was “men for others.” Growing up in an economically privileged upbringing where the price of a Roman Catholic education at an all-boys private school was expensive back then – today, I could not even consider sending my own children to this school due to associated costs – the only “others” available in my insular worldview were the others who looked like me, whose fathers were doctors, lawyers, businessmen, and our mothers, many of whom did not need to work. These were our mothers and fathers who were always available for their sons’ soccer and baseball games. Early on, I learned that being “men for others” had a lot to do with economic advantage.

It wasn’t until I came to a deepening of my own faith and its radical rebirth in my mid-‘20s, that “the other” would confront my own worldview in an entirely different manner. After receiving my undergraduate degree at Towson University, I decided to attend The Ecumenical Institute of Theology at St. Mary’s Seminary & University. The school itself was a product of Vatican II cooperation between Episcopalians and Catholics. By this time, I had left my own Roman Catholic upbringing, and was uncomfortably comfortable “church-jumping” (a pejorative phrase for someone who knows he has no accountability and takes full advantage of his liberty) from one non-denominational church to the next. I attended the Institute, therefore, because, in all honesty, the program was affordable, accredited, and there were no viable programs in the immediate area that offered the quality of education I could get here.

Yet at the Institute, it was first time I was truly presented with something more than doctrine. Here, I sat in the classroom and encountered other human bodies, many from traditional mainline denominations but also those from other backgrounds, each of whom confessed to experiencing similar fears, failures, and spiritual concerns, as they questioned themselves and their own traditions. This had the effect of turning me inward, and while one might think that such a turn is counterintuitive to interfaith dialogue, it was a step that allowed for self-critical examination of my own prejudices, and allowed me to open up to the person occupying the seat next to me, whose love and adoration for Christ was becoming harder and harder to impeach as some form of inauthentic expression the more they explained their own faith journey to me.

In my final year of study, I wanted to do a thesis for my final culminating experience. The discipline I chose was Christian Ethics and the theologian whose lens I chose to look through was Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a Lutheran who enjoys rock star status among Protestant Christians, but who also has a broader appeal as well. It was in reading Bonhoeffer, in reading reflections about him, in carefully looking at the importance of his own struggles with social justice as a Christian imperative, that my conservative bent towards the primacy of personal piety, already in a state of flux, started to complete a much needed retreat.

One of the most important expressions of Bonhoeffer’s deep and abiding sense of Christology was not Exclusivism, but Inclusivism. This Inclusivism was a call to enter into the experience of the “Other,” a theme that occupies his own writings from his early work on Sanctorum Communio to his unfinished work known as Ethics. Bonhoeffer’s concept of the Other was not only an integral part of loving one’s enemies who are actively seeking your harm, but also those who for whatever reason have caused you little concern. For Bonhoeffer, the question of Otherness was then tied both to the Reich Church, but also to the Jews  in Germany in the 1930s through 1940s who were being persecuted. It was a Germany in which one’s neighbor might be one’s enemy but unlike our society, could not be avoided.

It reminded me of Jesus’ own time, one which was riveted by its own culture wars, a world in which the Other, be that individual Jew, Samaritan, or Roman could not help but be engaged. The Otherness, however, of interfaith dialogue was something that I had been disengaging, especially because the community where I dwelt could remain geographically isolated in its Protestant, white, upper-middle class character and unaffected by the real demands of the gospel, except to pick a pet homeless project in someone else’s community for a couple hours a week.  Otherness, I found had not been grasped, neither by me nor by those with whom I chose to worship.

The significance of Bonhoeffer dissolved the dogmatic boundaries of transcendence as a category of epistemology and became for me what Bonhoeffer had demanded in his own form: a relational ethic in Christ. Christology then for Bonhoeffer was not an expression of knowledge “How does Christ operate in the world,” but rather “Who is Christ for me?” The form of Christ therefore is not what he looks like as a subject of knowledge, but how he forms himself in the people who are the Church.

This revelation, and it was a revelation, meant that where doctrine, Dogmatics, and epistemology had been my reigning hermeneutical pressure points, if I were to understand myself as a Christian, I was fully obligated to take in the charge and, at times, the challenge of the Other. And because this had to be done in love, there was no turning that person, be that individual Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, or Buddhist, into an object of ethical abstraction. He or she had to be embraced in his or her own life, work, and worship. The significance of this charge in Bonhoeffer’s day was so great, that when he wrote a popular work on the Church and the “Jewish Question” in the early 1930s, in which he speaks about ministering to those who are themselves a community within his community, a later editor seemed uncomfortable and decided to insert some passages by Luther on a Christian’s proper orientation to the Jew for the purpose of bringing them to Christ. Yet Bonhoeffer himself does not go this route.

Among some of the takeaways from my time at the State of Formation conference was an ancillary event in which we heard a panel speak about their contributions to a new book of essays entitled My Neighbor’s Faith. In hearing Dr. John MaKransky, professor of Buddhist and Comparative Theology at Boston University, speak on the “Religious Other,” Bonhoeffer immediately resurfaced. I stopped him after the lecture to discuss my observations. Dr. Makransky was intrigued to discover that this concept of Otherness and the idea of “freedom from the world as freedom for the world” is as much a concept in Bonhoeffer’s writings as it was for him in his early explorations of Hinduism through his own Buddhist context. To quote a line from Dr. Makransky’s own contribution to the book, “I had a strong desire to understand how freedom from the world could become such a powerful force of enlightened activity in and for the world.”

Makransky asked me where he could find this in Bonhoeffer and I pointed him in the direction, but in doing so I too was compelled to go search out the Bhagavad Gita, which had framed part of his own story. There were other things said by Makransky through his own experience that brought to life Bonhoeffer’s own theology as a personal charge, and I am all too glad to pursue those down this road.

I ended up spending some of the most important moments of the conference in dialogue with my Buddhist friend Bhikshuni Lozang Trinlae. She was charismatic, passionate, and readily accessible. As an ex-Roman Catholic who grew up in a farming community in Connecticut she had a lot to add about her own experience of Christianity.  I was able to bounce back my own questions. It was in breaking bread, in going down to the local sports bar and restaurant and conversing on important questions of nonviolence and her own tradition of scriptural discourse that helped reinforce the human face I had found in Bhikshuni.

Some of my conservative Christian friends, who continue to remain cut off from this conversation, who attempt to convince me that their love, to use Makransky’s phrase for the “Religious Other,” is no empty shell but genuine and true must understand that where love will flourish, it always has a mind to seek out the expression of humanity in the Other. It is very hard to love a community of people who exist to you only on the front pages of newspapers by way of streams of negative images or as hypothetical communities to which abstract commands are directed.  Living by accident in communities of religious diversity is not the same thing as living intentionally. While you may not be out rightly hostile to them, you obliterate the Other person each time to fail to enter into their humanity, seeing them as the Other. Christians have a phrase: Christ died for that person. How wonderful would it be if we understood this as more than a mode of proselytization and like Bonhoeffer, as an affirmation of our shared humanity?

In closing, my own tradition continues to speak to me very powerfully. But I’m learning that my tradition is incomplete without these other voices. I’m learning that so much of the work that non-denominational and Baptist churches have done to avoid stagnant sermons on doctrine and dogma to create a “non-threatening” worship experience that draws in people who are traditionally frightened by past images of a heavy-handed Church is no different than the kind of work that is being asked of those who are interested in interfaith dialogue. We are onto something here. And as one who comes to the table through Christianity, I would only add that perhaps what makes you most uncomfortable is precisely where you need to be if you are going to have any chance of grasping the meaning of the gospel of Jesus Christ at a deeper level.

Image from Wikipedia Commons: File:Bietigheim-hrdlicka-Portraet-Bonhoefer p1160185.jpg